October 2012 - Informatics

E-Gov Products & Servicesthe hand held devices basically shouldsupport the template formats. Similarly,ISO/IEC 19794-4 specifies fingerprintsimage standard and ISO/IEC 14794-2for minutiae data standard. Generally,the hand held terminals are compliant toboth ANSI 378/ISO 19794-2 formats.WHERE THE HAND HELD DEVICESARE BEST FITTED?Over the last decade, hundreds of webenabled e-government systems havebeen deployed in India. It needscitizens’ participation and transparencyin operations. Electronic Payment ofBills including utility services likeElectricity Bills, Telephone bills can bepaid electronically and thus citizens canavoid going to receipt counters of thecorporation or post offices and standingin long queues for payment of theirelectricity bills. Though theseapplications are available in web it hadevoked partial response.Apart from these, the majorapplications like Public DistributionSystem, Property Tax payments,Disbursement of Aid or materialsthrough camps can be done with Handheld devices. In all these systems, thecomputers need not be situated or takento citizen doorsteps. Only the handy PoSdevices can be taken by the official forthe safe transactions.The Hand held devices helps thesolutions provider inl Centralized server update and receiptprintingl Productivity enhancement of staffl Real time inventory managementl Avoid book record keepingl Reduce fraudl Secure transactions using biometricauthenticationl Transactions updated in real time oncentral serverl Updated customer data at centralserver without carrying a computersystem or laptop towards the citizen.PROBLEM UNDERSTANDINGA well defined work flow is requiredto implement a successful Hand helddevice based system. If a system isaddressing to a huge recordsgeographically distributed and updatethe transactions every month byverifying and authenticating theindividual, the hand held device is thebest tool for implementing the same.The system requires clear work flowfor the following:HAND HELD TERMINAL IN PDSAPPLICATIONA typical application of the Hand heldterminal is now can be seen in PDSapplications of few states. In PDSapplication, a state may have a back-enddatabase of card holders, the quantity ofcommodities issued to each FP Shop.The state PDS system requires aneffective mechanism to monitor thedelivery of commodities to the rationcard holders through FP Shops. Here,the Hand held terminal serves thepurpose.l The system should have thecapability to move the enumerated datato PoS or smart card for makingtransactions.l If a Citizen is visiting the FP Shop,then he has to bring or produce therelevant smart card based ID card orration card for verification.l Biometric fingerprint authenticationis done using handheld terminal bycomparing the fingerprint data availablein Smart card with the individual. Thisensures secure transactions.l If the Hand held terminal is used forissuing commodities from a FP Shop,either a bar code available in the rationcard or smart card will be verified for theeligibility or the category of the citizen.The FP dealer will also have a smart cardcontaining the card holders details, pricepolicy, and quantity of bags lifted fromwarehouse.l After verification, the official issuesthe commodities to the beneficiary andhands over receipt generated using inbuiltprinter in handheld terminal.l Two receipts can be generated: onefor beneficiary and another for officialpurpose.l The transaction details can be storedin handheld terminal / smart card.l Data is uploaded from handheldterminal to central server in ONLINEmode through GSM/GPRS, CDMA, orPSTN mode of communication or inOFFLINE mode using USB drive.Batch mode updation is also possible forbulk updation at any interval on a day.l Reports at various levels aregeneratedFor the above processes, a customizedapplication is required in Hand heldterminal.A custom built MIS can bedeveloped to monitor the online modeupdations at the central server and thecollections across the districts or a placecan be seen online.With the above features, the registersmaintained in FP Shops are madeelectronic, and closing stock of FP Shopare made online. Simultaneously, thedelivery to card holders are trackedonline by the department.Sufficient study is required and designdocument containing Hand heldterminal specifications, smart cardspecifications and the applicationspecifications are required for thecomplete functioning of the system.FOR FURTHER INFORMATIONV. Gopi SwaminathanPrincipal Systems Analyst, NIC,PuducherryEmail: gopi.pon@nic.inOctober 2012 | informatics.nic.in | 11